Upcoming University and Messenger Lectures
University Lecturer
Dr. Cynthia Miller Idriss ’94, Professor, School of Public Affairs and School of Education Justice, Law & Criminology
Lecture Title: TBD
Date: September 30, 2026
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
Dr. Miller Idriss recently publish a book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025). From the nomination: “Dr. Miller-Idriss’s work represents a bold and incisive analysis of the link between misogyny and far-right extremism throughout the Western Hemisphere…Dr. Miller-Idriss is a sociologist and scholar of extremism and radicalization who graduated from Cornell in 1994 with a BA in Sociology and German Area Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2003. She now holds an appointment as Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University. She is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) research lab, which combines quantitative, cultural, policy, and media analysis to understand how hate and violence emerge in society.”
Messenger Lecturer
Shrinivas R. (Shri) Kulkarni is the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and
Planetary Science at Caltech.
Lecture Titles: TBD
Date: October 13, 15 and 20, 2026
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
Excerpt from his Messenger Lecturer nomination:
“There are few modern astronomical observers who have been as successful as Shri Kulkarni in making diverse, foundational and transformational discoveries in astronomy.
His astronomical accomplishments include:
1. finding the first millisecond pulsar (a neutron star with mass greater than that of the Sun spinning at 641 times per second),
2. identifying the first brown dwarf (a so-called “failed star” slighly too light to be able to ignite hydrogen burning in its core),
3. providing the first distance measurement to a gamma-ray burst (a brief intense burst of gamma rays, the brightest and most powerful class of explosion in the universe) placing it outside our own galaxy,
4. developing an instrument and survey for fast radio bursts (a short transient emission of radio waves) and localizing one such burst to a galactic magnetar (highly magnetized neutron star),
5. building the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and Zwicky Transient Factory (ZTF) to study variable or transient astronomical objects in the optical bands.”
University Lecturer
Professor Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Lecture Title: TBD
Date: November 2026
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From the University of Hong Kong website: Professor Frank Dikötter was Distinguished Visiting Professor for the Academic Year 2004-5. In 2006, he was appointed to the new position of Chair of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts. Before moving to Hong Kong, he was Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published a dozen books and over 65 refereed articles and chapters in books that have changed the way we look at the history of modern China. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He has raised more than HKD15 million for pure research and has over 8,000 citations on Google Scholar. His Mao’s Great Famine won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011. He is a full-time Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and holds an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.
Messenger Lecturer
Eric Liu, co-founder and CEO of Citizen University
Lecture Titles: TBD
Dates: Fall 2026
Times: TBD
Places: TBD
From Citizen University website: Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University. He is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including most recently Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy — a New York Times New & Notable Book — and Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country, to be published in October 2026. Liu served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and as the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He was later appointed by President Barack Obama to the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Liu was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-chairs its Our Common Purpose commission. He lives in Seattle, where he has served on the boards of the Seattle Public Library and the Washington State Board of Education.
University Lecturer
Ziad Obermeyer is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Lecture Title: TBD
Date: ’26-’27 Academic Year
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From UC Berkeley webpage: Ziad Obermeyer is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, where he does research at the intersection of machine learning, medicine, and health policy. He previously was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, where he received the Early Independence Award, the National Institutes of Health’s most prestigious award for exceptional junior scientists. He continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved parts of the US. Prior to his career in medicine, he worked as a consultant to pharmaceutical and global health clients at McKinsey & Co. in New Jersey, Geneva, and Tokyo.
University Lecturer
Professor Kate Elswit is Head of Digital Research and Professor of Performance and Technology at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.
Lecture Title: TBD
Date: February 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From the nomination: Kate Elswit is Professor of Performance and Technology and Head of Digital Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for
Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ), which was founded in 2024 with £5.6 million investment from Research England. Her research sits at the intersection of bodies and technology, from archival data curation and visualization, to performances with breath monitors, to exploratory research in motion capture, computer vision, and AI.
University Lecturer
Gil Eyal is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Director of the Trust Collaboratory at INCITE.
Lecture Title: proposed “AI’s Prosthetic Role in Society”
Date: March 10, 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From Columbia University Center for Science and Society webpage: Gil Eyal is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Director of the Trust Collaboratory at INCITE. At Columbia, he teaches sociological theory, sociology of expertise, introduction to sociology, and trust and mistrust in science and experts. He is the author of The Crisis of Expertise and The Autism Matrix (Merton Prize). His work on networks of expertise and the crisis of trust has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Facebook Research, and currently by the National Science Foundation for research on Long Covid patients. In 2021-22, he directed a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Trust and Mistrust in Science and Experts. Previously, he was co-director Columbia’s Precision Medicine & Society Program.
University Lecturer
Dr. Britt Wray, director of Stanford University’s “CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry”
Lecture Title: TBD
Date: April 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From the nomination: “Dr. Wray is director of Stanford University’s “CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry,” a
research and action initiative focused on Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership and Emotional wellbeing. She is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety (2022), a carefully-researched general audience book on how to support young people as they face eco-anxiety related to climate and environment-related fears. Dr. Wray received in 2023 the top prize in the “Research Scientist: Early Career” category of the SciComm Excellence awards given by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, & Medicine in partnership with Schmidt Futures. Dr. Wray’s work
crosses, among other disciplines, psychology, environmental studies, ethics, and communication.”
University Lecturer
Dr. Hariclia Brecoulaki, Senior Researcher, the Institute for Historical Research, Athens, Greece
Lecture Title: (proposed) “Revealing an Ancient Masterpiece: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Aigai Hunt Frieze”
Date: Spring 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From the nomination: Dr. Brecoulaki is a senior member of the National Hellenic Research Foundation in the Institute for Historical Research in Athens, Greece. She earned her PhD from the Sorbonne, Paris, in 2003 and has held several fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as well as the University of Cincinnati and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in Philadelphia. In addition to publishing several highly important studies of ancient Greek painting (including several monographs and influential
articles), Dr. Brecoulaki recently served as PI of a multi-disciplinary project bringing together scientists, art historians, and artists from across the European Union in a new study and reconstruction of one of the most important frescoes to have survived from Ancient Greece – the Hunt Frieze from the Tomb of Philip (father of Alexander the Great) at Vergina in ancient Macedon. This high-profile project involved X-Ray technologies, spectroscopy and spectral imaging, 3D visualization, and AI, alongside archaeological and art-historical analysis and creative reconstructions by a professional painter.
University Lecturer
Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Chicago.
Lecture Title: proposed topic “Conversational conformism”
Date: ’27-’28 Academic Year
Time: TBD
Place: TBD
From the University of Chicago website: Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy. She received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.